Good choice in the interim

Sunday

Jun 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMJun 30, 2013 at 10:39 AM

By accepting the position of interim superintendent of Columbus City Schools, J. Daniel Good has guaranteed himself an extremely interesting and challenging year. The Dispatch wishes him the best of luck in what might be the most important job in the city for the next 12 months: setting a battered school district on a path toward a better future.

By accepting the position of interim superintendent of Columbus City Schools, J. Daniel Good has guaranteed himself an extremely interesting and challenging year. The Dispatch wishes him the best of luck in what might be the most important job in the city for the next 12 months: setting a battered school district on a path toward a better future.

Facing a district in which public trust and internal morale have been devastated by a yearlong, still-unresolved scandal involving widespread manipulation of student data, Good has some housecleaning and rebuilding to do. Doing both of those effectively will require some sober fact-finding. That will become much easier when state Auditor Dave Yost’s report on the data-rigging is released, but even before then, Good can focus on the policies and procedures that allowed what appears to be an extensive conspiracy to develop.

Establishing a new culture of honesty, transparency and accountability will go far to encourage the best employees, especially the most-effective building principals, to stay and rebuild.

One can only hope the Board of Education, whose actions and inactions played a large part in allowing the district to reach this unprecedented state of crisis, is sincere in the desire, as stated by President Carol Perkins, to “right the ship” and “to begin to rebuild that trust that has been broken.”

Those statements, coming more than a year after allegations of cheating became public, are the board’s first official acknowledgement that their actions and those of top district officials have caused real harm.

Good is a wise choice for interim leader. The 51-year-old retired on Friday from Westerville City Schools, where he served as superintendent for six years.

Though a suburban district, Westerville has faced growing challenges in recent years. Since 2007, the percentage of its students in poverty has risen steadily, from 22 percent to 32 percent, and the student body has become more diverse. Despite this, during Good’s tenure, the district’s performance on state report cards has improved, with its overall grade rising from A to A+.

He has not used Westerville’s challenges as an excuse to accept lower performance, and he gets high marks from peer superintendents.

Good also is accustomed to facing fiscal restrictions and having to justify the need for new tax money; his former district has faced an unusual degree of organized opposition to recent tax-levy requests.

This could be invaluable when the Columbus district goes before voters in November with an operating levy that, under the terms of a state law passed expressly for Columbus City Schools, can be shared with charter schools that serve children who live in the district. Columbus voters traditionally have supported school-tax levies, even through anemic academic progress. This time could be tougher, though, with public confidence weakened by the scandal and voter uncertainty about the new charter-sharing option.

Beyond all that, there is a school district to run. Even as Good works to straighten out the mess the district is in, preparation for the implementation of Common Core academic-content standards, plus more-stringent state report-card standards coming in the 2014-15 school year, must go forward.

If Good has a productive year, the future will look brighter for Columbus children a year from now.

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